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The Aurora Orchestra staged a Proms first last year when it performed Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 from memory. Now the dynamic young ensemble returns to continue this season’s sequence of family-friendly matinees, giving Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony the same direct, communicative treatment. It is paired with Australian composer Brett Dean’s own homage to nature – a work, he explains, inspired by ‘glorious birdsong, the threat that it faces, the loss, and the soulless noise that we’re left with when they’re all gone’. Former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist Francesco Piemontesi joins the orchestra for Mozart’s late ‘Coronation’ Concerto, and the afternoon also features the premiere of a new commission from British composer Anna Meredith – also performed from memory.

Mahler’s mighty Symphony No. 5 is the climax of this second Prom from Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. The work’s intense, contrasting moods – the bitter solemnity of the funeral march, the violence of the second movement and the tenderness of the famous Adagietto – make this one of the great orchestral showpieces. The evening opens with the world premiere of a dramatic new symphony from Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan.

‘It is not enough to construct one’s revolution, one must also dream it’: thus, Pierre Boulez once formulated his artistic credo. It would never have been enough for him to appear only as a prophet of the avant-garde and a radical revolutionary, administering fundamental criticism to rigid, anti-modernist structures with his notorious demand to blow up all opera houses. Instead, as a composer he was always a sensuous poet of sound, striving quite traditionally for technical mastery and personal expression in equal measure, also and especially when experimenting with the latest techniques, such as guided chance and live electronics – a dedicated explorer and reformer. Reflecting his search for perfection and the ideal implementation of his thoughts, many of his pieces have undergone various stages of development, growing in scope, instrumentation and duration and thereby becoming others, as if they were living organisms undergoing maturation. If Salzburg contemporary takes Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday as an occasion to focus on his eminent œuvre, naturally this includes some of the great key works of New Music of the past 70 years – interpreted by the friends, students and comrades-in-arms of this singular musician, who has also made history as a conductor. With the French tradition ranging from Debussy to Boulez’s influential teacher Olivier Messiaen, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, the series also highlights some of the music of the past that influenced Boulez. These works are complemented by a new piece by Olga Neuwirth, whose music Pierre Boulez is very fond of: a portrait of the artist as an ageless man.

‘It is not enough to construct one’s revolution, one must also dream it’: thus, Pierre Boulez once formulated his artistic credo. It would never have been enough for him to appear only as a prophet of the avant-garde and a radical revolutionary, administering fundamental criticism to rigid, anti-modernist structures with his notorious demand to blow up all opera houses. Instead, as a composer he was always a sensuous poet of sound, striving quite traditionally for technical mastery and personal expression in equal measure, also and especially when experimenting with the latest techniques, such as guided chance and live electronics – a dedicated explorer and reformer. Reflecting his search for perfection and the ideal implementation of his thoughts, many of his pieces have undergone various stages of development, growing in scope, instrumentation and duration and thereby becoming others, as if they were living organisms undergoing maturation. If Salzburg contemporary takes Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday as an occasion to focus on his eminent œuvre, naturally this includes some of the great key works of New Music of the past 70 years – interpreted by the friends, students and comrades-in-arms of this singular musician, who has also made history as a conductor. With the French tradition ranging from Debussy to Boulez’s influential teacher Olivier Messiaen, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, the series also highlights some of the music of the past that influenced Boulez. These works are complemented by a new piece by Olga Neuwirth, whose music Pierre Boulez is very fond of: a portrait of the artist as an ageless man.

The starting point for Paul Barker's double-bill is how to do opera without a voice. Not just a singing voice, but without any voice at all. My Voice and Me is the autobiography of Oliver Curry, an English tenor who lost his voice as a result of rehearsing I Pagliacci in Naples many decades ago; it left him voiceless, unable to make any sound. He tells the story today with the aid of a synthetic voice (which sounds uncannily like Stephen Hawking) whilst simultaneously playing the piano. Oliver's wife, soprano Maria Bovino, makes an unexpected guest appearance. Of Zoe and the Woman I Sing explores in three acts the relationship between an artist and his muse. Actress Zoë Lister is that muse whom the artist turns into an avatar, the better to control her. The avatar speaks with a unique synthetic voice developed by Toshiba Europe along with Paul Barker, modelled on Zoë, designed to emulate any human emotion. Barker has composed many operas exploring different languages and his most recent, EL Gallo, is an opera for six actors and two string quartets without text. It has been performed across several continents with over 100 performances and has won several awards. His exploration of opera now returns to language but dispenses with singers and expects instrumentalists to act.

The starting point for Paul Barker's double-bill is how to do opera without a voice. Not just a singing voice, but without any voice at all. My Voice and Me is the autobiography of Oliver Curry, an English tenor who lost his voice as a result of rehearsing I Pagliacci in Naples many decades ago; it left him voiceless, unable to make any sound. He tells the story today with the aid of a synthetic voice (which sounds uncannily like Stephen Hawking) whilst simultaneously playing the piano. Oliver's wife, soprano Maria Bovino, makes an unexpected guest appearance. Of Zoe and the Woman I Sing explores in three acts the relationship between an artist and his muse. Actress Zoë Lister is that muse whom the artist turns into an avatar, the better to control her. The avatar speaks with a unique synthetic voice developed by Toshiba Europe along with Paul Barker, modelled on Zoë, designed to emulate any human emotion. Barker has composed many operas exploring different languages and his most recent, EL Gallo, is an opera for six actors and two string quartets without text. It has been performed across several continents with over 100 performances and has won several awards. His exploration of opera now returns to language but dispenses with singers and expects instrumentalists to act.

Currie is the dedicatee of MacMillan’s new Second Percussion Concerto, which has a special focus on the scintillating sounds of metal percussion and a provocative combination of lyricism and visceral energy. It’s a tough physical workout for Currie as soloist – and a thrilling ride for listeners.

‘It is not enough to construct one’s revolution, one must also dream it’: thus, Pierre Boulez once formulated his artistic credo. It would never have been enough for him to appear only as a prophet of the avant-garde and a radical revolutionary, administering fundamental criticism to rigid, anti-modernist structures with his notorious demand to blow up all opera houses. Instead, as a composer he was always a sensuous poet of sound, striving quite traditionally for technical mastery and personal expression in equal measure, also and especially when experimenting with the latest techniques, such as guided chance and live electronics – a dedicated explorer and reformer. Reflecting his search for perfection and the ideal implementation of his thoughts, many of his pieces have undergone various stages of development, growing in scope, instrumentation and duration and thereby becoming others, as if they were living organisms undergoing maturation. If Salzburg contemporary takes Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday as an occasion to focus on his eminent œuvre, naturally this includes some of the great key works of New Music of the past 70 years – interpreted by the friends, students and comrades-in-arms of this singular musician, who has also made history as a conductor. With the French tradition ranging from Debussy to Boulez’s influential teacher Olivier Messiaen, and the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, the series also highlights some of the music of the past that influenced Boulez. These works are complemented by a new piece by Olga Neuwirth, whose music Pierre Boulez is very fond of: a portrait of the artist as an ageless man.

The Proms’ Sibelius symphony cycle continues with the concise, intricately wrought Third and the darker Fourth – once described by conductor Herbert Blomstedt as ‘an essay in trying to be happy which fails – on purpose’. These are paired with the composer’s popular Violin Concerto with Lithuanian soloist Julian Rachlin. Conductor Ilan Volkov is a passionate champion of contemporary music and here premieres a new Sibelius-inspired work by Michael Finnissy – a composer whose music, though fascinatingly complex, finds real connection with politics, society and culture.

Music theatre (2014)
Libretto by Roland Schimmelpfennig
adapted by Peter Eötvös
First performance in Austria
Co-production with Ensemble Modern
and Oper Frankfurt

An Asian fast-food restaurant where five people from different generations meet. A small man suffering from toothache. The fable of the ant and the cricket. A tooth that is removed with a wrench and lands in a stewardess's bowl of soup. A family that makes a phone call from the gap in the teeth.

Roland Schimmelpfennig's theatrical fable The Golden Dragon, which premiered at Vienna's Burgtheater in 2009, has been adapted by the Hungarian composer Peter Eötvös as a many-layered piece of music theatre, in which five performers play 18 roles. After its world premiere at Oper Frankfurt, the most recent stage work by one of the most successful opera composers of our time is now being performed at the Bregenz Festival. For the production, the world renowned Ensemble Modern is returning to Lake Constance after a ten-year absence.

Hailed recently by The New York Times as “ingenious,” New York City’s Ensemble for the Romantic Century (ERC) returns to the Berkshires for the third consecutive summer with the regional premiere of the theatrical concert Van Gogh’s Ear. In partnership with the American Institute for Economic Research and the Clark Art Institute, the 10-day, 12-performance series of Van Gogh’s Ear complements Clark’s art exhibition Van Gogh and Nature and features a special pre-performance discussion August 25th led by the Clark’s curator at large, Richard Kendall.

Jürg Wyttenbach has always defied borders – whether between the arts, genres, or stylistic levels. This is clear from the first sampling of his Lucerne retrospective as composer-in-residence, when we will encounter instrumentalists transformed into singers and actors, clowning into performance art, vocal experimentation into enigmatic chansons, and eccentric miniatures into a half-hour-long madrigal play that here receives its world premiere. Above all this hovers the spirit of Mani Matter, the famous Swiss singer-songwriter. A colorful evening on the cusp between anarchy and artistic alchemy is what you should expect. And you can be sure it will turn to gold thanks not only to Wyttenbach’s musical and theatrical imagination but also to his rebellious and mischievous sense of humor.

Music as a way of viewing images: in Jürg Wyttenbach’s Violin Concerto from 2013 the instrumentalists seem to have jumped straight out of the screen. And indeed Gustave Courbet’s famous monumental painting A Burial in Ornans will be projected as an enlarged image on the stage. Wyttenbach has translated Courbet’s “rigidified dance of death” into a “masterful piece of music theater,” wrote the Basler Zeitung following the world premiere. His Cortège (“Procession, Funeral March”) is led by the solo violin – played by the wonderful Carolin Widmann – as the ”harlequin of death,” while the other musicians represent the villagers: the bass tuba for example is the heavyset mayor, while the trumpets are two old veterans of the Revolution. A procession also comes to mind in Charles Ives’s Third Symphony, The Camp Meeting, which evokes the eponymous Presbyterian revival meeting with its church hymns, much as the composer experienced them in his childhood.

“His drive for freedom is like a stream that floods everything and in which everything has a place, from the craziest and most blasphemous to the most intelligent.” Composer-in-residence Jürg Wyttenbach has always been fond of the French Renaissance novelist François Rabelais. He is especially fascinated by the open, indeed wildly episodic layout of Rabelais’ masterwork Gargantua and Pantagruel, which indulges an irrepressible love for storytelling and “in that very moment recreates the form of the novel and language.” Corresponding to this is Gargantua chez les Helvètes du Haut-Valais, which was initially conceived as part of a richly associative collage opera on Rabelais that was never completed. It juxtaposes folkloric and experimental approaches, folk music instruments and advanced playing techniques, life-affirming earthiness and ambiguous Dadaist language games. Originally written for the Oberwalliser Spillit, Wyttenbach has newly arranged his “questionable, though thoroughly bucolic scenes” – as the subtitle has it – for the Lucerne-based ensemble Alpini Vernähmlassig.

Experimental American composer Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) performs a new live soundtrack to accompany a screening of the Katsuhiro Otomo film Magnetic Rose. Oneohtrix, recently cited by NME as one of the ‘100 most influential artists’, creates futuristic soundscapes that continuously conjure mystical images of the unknown. This Scottish premiere adds a whole new dimension to the accompanying footage. The second part of the evening features a performance of Bullet Hell Abstraction IV, a new composition inspired by video games.

Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons is Richter’s subtly radical postmodern remix of one of classical music’s best-loved works, taking the great Baroque composer’s four concertos as the starting point for a startling musical transformation bringing in loops, samples, drifting ambient soundscapes and monumental walls of sound.

This special Festival performance brings together the work’s original performers – respected international solo violinist Daniel Hope, conductor and contemporary music specialist André de Ridder, with Richter himself on keyboards and electronics – who are joined by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

Memoryhouse is an intoxicating journey through the beauty and tragedy of 20th-century Europe, combining music, poetry and voices to explore stories real and imagined, with Baroque harpsichord, soaring strings, poignant piano, electronics and orchestra.

Max Richter’s Recomposed: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons is the music for Wayne McGregor’s Kairos performed by Ballett Zürich at the Edinburgh Playhouse on 27–29 Aug

Nova Music Opera brings together a pair of contemporary chamber operas by Charlotte Bray and Thomas Hyde about misunderstood characters from modern British history. In the sixtieth anniversary year of her controversial execution, the end of Ruth Ellis’ life is examined in Charlotte Bray’s work Entanglement.

Thomas Hyde’s That Man Stephen Ward, premiered to wonderful reviews in 2008, charts the demise of one of the more tragic characters involved in the Profumo scandal of the early 1960s.

Composers Richard Reed Parry and Bryce Dessner, also members of rock bands Arcade Fire and The National respectively, take as inspiration the different wave cycles of the world’s oceans in a work for string orchestra and film. The music, composed directly to the actual rhythms of waves, is performed live by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to a film made by the photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto who created an iconic series of seascape photos in the 1980s.

The two acclaimed musicians will perform alongside members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for Heart & Breath, with Bryce Dessner on guitar and Richard Reed Parry on bass. Heart & Breath is based around the idea of using the widely varying internal rhythms of the performers’ bodies as performance parameters, relying on the breathing rates of the players to determine the pace of the music.

Dessner's Murder Ballades will also be performed by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra is a fascinating score based on American ballads about murder. It was originally created as a score for a piece by L.A. Dance Project, who appeared at the Festival in 2013.

Respected conductor, pianist and publisher David Wordsworth discusses tonight’s eclectic programme with composers Gabriel Jackson, whose choral/orchestral work
opens the concert; David Matthews, whose Three Housman Songs receive their premiere in a new version for soprano and string orchestra and Toby Young, whose setting of William Blake’s Love and Harmony is also heard.